1/15/25
(This post could cause triggers for some. For an explanation of ‘splinter’ please use the ‘Cast Of Characters’ tab on the home page.)
Blessed year to you, Beautiful/Handsome Being ~
How has the beginning of the year been for you? Have you made and kept any resolutions? And more importantly, did you remember to acknowledge what’s right about you, too?
I don’t usually make new year resolutions but now have several accountability partners for different areas of life. One each for journaling and exercising, and I’ve signed up to be a part of an online writers group. We’ll see if we all have what it takes to be annoyingly persistent in trying to get each other to do what we claim we want to do. 🙂
The coach I’ve been working with for the “Prayers That Heart the Heart” (PTHTH) course I’ve been taking through CWG Ministries has really been helpful in making a difference. PTHTH was written as a twelve week class but due to all the emotions and memories it’s exposing it’s taking quite a bit longer to slog through than anticipated.
It’s been hard, emotionally messy, and frustrating at times but I’m worth the time, cost and effort to be set free from the tyranny of the past and learning to increasingly engage in and enjoy life and love more. (And so are you, by the way, if you could use some encouragement to keep going or are considering getting some help to heal.)
The impatient part of me that’s been on this journey to overcome the effects of the trafficking, abuses, child pornography, etc., by using myriads of therapeutic techniques for seemingly way too long now is being tempered with the victories that are taking shape.
Hallelujah!
As has been the way for all these years, I can still vacillate between feeling as if this is never going to end and realizing how far I’ve come, but the hope for complete healing is growing.
Lately I’ve been working on healing the root causes of the feelings of fear, self condemnation and doubt that have been sabotaging my life. It’s been extensive, exhausting at times, overwhelming and oh so very worth it.
In the post from 12/14/24, “We Love Because He First Loved Us”, I had written about a memory I thought had been healed in a previous session. I hadn’t realized there was another aspect to the event that was waiting for the right time to emerge and be worked through. An older ‘splinter’ of my fractured psyche made herself known and I call her ‘Penelope’.
With the ‘splinters’ I’ve dealt with over the years, they were parts of my mind that became arrested at whatever age the trauma happened so they were always quite young. Had no idea one could be so much older.
Also had no idea how to deal with Penelope. With the younger ones, it’s been a matter of trying to help them grow up by nurturing them and letting them know they won’t be punished for telling whatever memories and feelings they’d been keeping until I was ready to deal with them.
The image that had introduced Penelope consciously was one of an aging woman at the end of her life. I had no idea what she represented nor how to resuscitate her back to my current age.
Turns out, I didn’t need to know because God did (of course! :))..
There’ve been moments over the years when I could acknowledge this aspect was a problem but there was a hopelessness attached to it so it would be submerged again. Relationship issues can’t heal in a vacuum so if I can’t let a great guy (g.g.) close enough to help cure the romantic versions of them, how could it ever possibly happen?
I shoulda known God would be able to do what I couldn’t imagine.
A couple of nights after that memory and image came up, I had a quasi-nightmare where frail Penelope, as she was represented in the previous post, emerged out of the darkness when an attic door was opened.
Then God showed me what He was doing in order to bring her back to life.
Jesus was sanding next to her propping her up while breathing His breath into her, CPR style. He was reviving her (me) with the spirit of life.
And I learned what I have to do – which is to keep reassuring her she’s safe with me now and I won’t self harm like in the past when the pain of what she represented became too much. Also, she (I) won’t be self-rejected if I’m too uncomfortable with what she’s trying to reveal and feel.
So, I’ve been directing some of the journaling I’ve been doing towards ‘Penelope’, telling her it’s o.k. now to be known and integrated.
The growing self-acceptance is transforming the initial hopelessness into hopefulness on a more consistent basis. (’tis been good to realize, I’m getting less dissociative and more cognizant when g.g.’s been in the vicinity. Thank You, God!) Thank God!
In that same dream there was another attic door that was opened with nothing emerging yet from the dark and I wonder if that has anything to do with the anger that’s still sloshing around.
Waaaay back when I began counseling, one of the first types of therapies I had tried was art. I loved it but it was stupidly expensive and not covered by insurance so I wasn’t going very often. Then when I moved too far away from that therapist I called many counseling centers in several counties as well as the few universities over a several state area that offered degrees in it, but none of them knew of anyone who practiced it within a fifty mile radius of where I’d moved, so it ended.
One of the exercises from that era was where the therapist had drawn an approximately nine inch wide circle in the middle of a large sheet of paper and had me color it in.
I was coloring so concisely within the line when she told me I could go outside of it if I felt inclined to, and she could make the circle bigger if needed. I kept the black inside the orb but it ended up growing, taking up four of the large sheets of paper taped together.
I think the circle represented the amount of anger and emotions that had been suppressed.
The other therapists I’ve worked with since then said the emotions that had been pent up would have to be released s-l-o-w-l-y over time, like the steam from a pressure cooker.
A lot of the anger has been dissipated, but here’s still a bit that needs to be worked through.
I’m grateful for the teachers at the dojang where I go for martial arts classes who understand, are nonjudgmental, and are letting me beat on their punching bags as needed.
It’s a conundrum though because I want someone there who I trust who’ll remind me, if needed, of where I’m at now and not still trapped in the abuses, but I also don’t want witnesses because of one of the ways I was used as a child.
Was forced to perform self annihilating sex acts with males of the species while other (ahem) a**holes were watching, hooting, hollering, jeering and leering.
There was also all the taunting that went on at home.
I still have a self protecting emotional shell that hasn’t been completely dissolved yet which makes it difficult to be open and vulnerable in front of people. So, I’m overthinking the snot out of doing that by wondering what would happen if the control I’ve tried to keep over the emotions slipped and things got ugly? What if the anger and/or pain it’s protecting started gushing out? Then myriads of scenarios of how that would go and other ‘what ifs’ are populating the brain making it a bigger issue than it really is.
I have to temper that with the perspective of how much greater God is than all of this, and let Him lead me to do what’s best, let Him work through me so I can, and to remember Jesus is with me if I ask Him to be.
We’ll see what happens.
In the meantime I hope you, too, have (or grow) a faith that reminds you whatever it is you may be facing that seems insurmountable really isn’t because you have a God Who is completely for you. A God who is so ‘omni’ everything He created this immense and beautiful universe, and so loving He is waiting to heal and redeem each us of anything and everything when we sincerely ask Him, and are willing to work (imperfectly) with Him as He does.
